Thanks to all of you for your comments! I appreciate all the feedback!
See, this is a really tough point for me. I love to listen to live-pa sets, but when they're *perfect*, and recorded right off the mixer, I don't find I often even recognize them as being live - and if I can't tell it's live, why should I care if it was live or not? For me, that spirals down to the whole "why bring out gear, why not just record my set in the studio and bring out CD's to play for the crowd, and jump around"... I know it's a stretch, but that's my opinion.Originally Posted by dirty_bass
I agree, the sound is pretty bad - it's recorded from a single $100 Sony stereo mic from the top of a scaffolding at the back of the dancefloor. Ideally, I'd like to record every set this way, and also record straight off the mixer, and mix the two recordings together - but now I'm starting to understand why high-end recording devices have "word clock" output!! It's surprisingly tough to get two recordings to sync up perfectly!
My new plan is to rebuild my Linux laptop as a Wavelab machine - it's got a nice big hard disk, and I've got an M-Audio USB "Quattro" soundcard kicking around - if I can record both the stereo mic *and* the mixer at the same time into Wavelab, then I'll hopefully end up with a recording that is worthy of listening.
I consider my livesets to be "concerts" rather than "mix sets" though, so while that may be unjustified ego, I still think being able to hear the crowd noise makes all the difference in the world in the recordings. :) I agree wholeheartedly that there needs to be a solid mix tho - the mic recordings make for a nice reverb to be played over top of the mixer recording, but to do that, I need to have both recordings at high quality. In the case of this set, the mixer recording was done to a little mp3-recorder harddisk jukebox thing, and it turned out that the recording quality was set to 112k mp3 at VBR, and on top of that the levels were off so it was overdriving for most of the set - unuseable. Sucks.
I'm really hoping to do this soon - I have another couple of live sets coming up, and some friends bugging me to try Ableton Live. I'm going to try to record the next liveset onto my laptop (doing the four-way thing). After the next liveset, I'm planning to sample my full set into Ableton (in the studio, of course), and assemble an EP of the best tracks... then maybe shop it around to some labels? I dunno who'd be interested, but would love some suggestions!Please please please can we hear a nicely recorded live PA or maybe some finished tracks.